Will higher education end up looking the same wherever you are in the world? (Note: Obviously I didn’t choose this picture to encourage you to continue reading this post. Oh no. I’d never exploit cats in that way.)

It was perhaps only a matter of time before the rapid internationalization* of higher education in Central Asia made its ways outside the region’s borders, moving away from the current focus on internationalization within the region.

There are examples of internationalization reaching Central Asia littered all over the place. Here are just a few to illustrate the multitudinous growth: the first US branch campus to set up in Uzbekistan, the recently founded English-medium instruction International University of Humanities and Development in Turkmenistan, the recruitment of foreign faculty to work in Kazakhstani universities (a review of a new article on this is coming soon to the blog), and the introduction of Master’s degrees in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as a new level of degree that would in the old system have slotted between the old five year “spetsialist” degree and PhD-equivalent Candidate of Science.

Like other states and regions, the countries of Central Asia are now thoroughly exposed to the range of ideas, influences and processes flowing through higher education systems around the world.

What differentiates one state or region from another is how it decides to deal with those flows, and how much power, legitimacy and money it has available in making those decisions.

Kazakhstan has long stood out from its Central Asian neighbours in terms of the attention given to higher education. As I have argued elsewhere, the state takes higher education seriously and the extensive activity in this sector demonstrates the importance of higher education to the country.

The South Kazakhstan Pedagogical University has opened an office in Brussels, Belgium, with the aim of opening a full branch campus in the future. The university also hopes to build international partnerships, support “integration into the international education space” and “promote the image of education and science of a Kazakhstani higher education institution abroad”.

These are lofty ambitions. It is interesting to see the reputational/brand-building element, as this suggests that the initiative is not just to be beneficial to the institution but to the Kazakh higher education system more generally. This stands out from other similar initiatives where the common motivation tend to centre on the benefits for the institution opening the branch campus – financial gain, opportunity to support exchange of their academics and students, etc.

South Kazakhstan Pedagogical University also has ambitions to open offices at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and the University of Aveiro, Portugal.

We should applaud the initiative of this Kazakhstani institution to bring Kazakh higher education to Europe and its efforts to broaden academic mobility beyond the longstanding “North to South” flow of students to what they perceive as “better” academic systems.

Here they are again. Isomorphkittens?

I just hope that in this rush to “internationalize”, higher education systems and institutions retain distinctiveness. By copying models and ideas seen elsewhere, we can’t help but become more similar to one another. That might be seen as beneficial if it uniformly raises the quality of higher education, the options available to students regardless of their geographic location, and the ability to share and produce knowledge.

But if we forget our histories and we no longer care about having a diversity of different types of institutions in different parts of the world, then I worry that higher education will lose the ability to inspire, engender and build on creativity. Without creativity, there will be no discovery, and without discovery our world would become a very small and limiting place.

*By internationalization – a now over-used term that runs the risk of becoming a catch-all term like globalization – I mean exposing higher education institutions, curricula, faculty, students and structural arrangements to ideas from other systems. For Central Asia this mainly means harmonization with European higher education standards propagated through the Bologna Process, although the American higher education system also provides a strong model.

This exposure to outside ideas is taken on board locally in three different ways (I am grateful for “finding” new institutional theory, which gives me the ability to identify and summarize this). Firstly, ideas can be voluntarily adopted by individuals/institutions/their states. Secondly, they can be taken on because there is a feeling of “catch up” (our system is less good than X’s system, we’d better adopt Y change in order to avoid the risk of falling behind) or stemming from a desire to join an imagined international higher education community. Thirdly, there may a coercive element to the adoption, usually as a condition of receiving funding from an outside body for reform – such as the World Bank/Russian government funded project in Tajikistan to implement changes to the system of admissions to higher education.